The week and a 1/2 I do not wish upon anyone...

Many of you know that Sadie just spent 10 days in the Hospital. It's been a crazy couple of weeks, but she is home now, and doing great!!
It all started the day after Christmas....she woke up and started throwing up, and it didn't stop for three days. At first I just thought she had the 24 hour bug everyone was getting, but when she was not pooping for three days and we were not getting sick, I knew something was wrong. On the Fri. after Christmas we took her to the ER because she was beyond dehydrated and was totally non responsive. They immediately put her on and IV to start hydrating her. After a couple hours of that her stomach and chest started to get really big, so that meant that something was not letting her intestines and stomach do thier job. So they ended up doing a Colonoscopy so see what was casuing the blockage. They could not see anything, so we spent the night there while her stomach got bigger by the hour and was in so much pain. That was probably one of the worst nights of my life. Seeing your child in so much pain, and not being able to do anything about it is the worst thing you have to go through! So the next day they were going to do a Cat Scan to see what was going on, but before then, the Surgeons assistant came in to see her and after seeing how bad her stomach looked and how she was totally non responsive, the Surgeon decided to do surgery right away. That was really the hardest thing I have had to do. There's something about seeing your child being wheeled away by doctors and not really knowing what is going on is pure torture. I was a wreck! Thankfully most of Noah's brothers and sisters and Mom and Dad came to the rescue and kept us company while we sat and waited for the surgery to be over. After about three hours, the surgeon came in and told us the surgery went great! He found a "congenital band", something that she had been born with, around the bowel part of her intestines that had been totally closed shut, causing her to get all backed up, and a part that was about to erupt because of the pressure. It had actually started infecting other things inside because it was dead intestines(yea, I know, this sounds crazy but it really happened!). He said if he would have waited another day he was almost sure in would have erupted and caused all that "crap" to be everywhere in her stomach and it would have been "really bad"! He also took out her appendix because it was right there and he didn't want any other problems going on in that spot down the road. What a relief that was! The surgeon was amazing! We really owe so much to him.
After surgery she spent about 4 days in the PICU, recovering. She was hooked up to just about every tube you can think of. She had 4 IVs going into her, a breathing tube, a tube going into her nose to her stomach pumping all the bile stuff out, and a catheter. That's a total of seven tubes and 4 sensors all working at once. Yea, she had a lot going on. It was pretty hard to see her like that, but I knew that the problem had been fixed and she was on the road to recovery! Slowly but surly they started pulling tubes out of her.

(This pic is in the PICU after they had removed a few of her tubes) After the 4 days in the PICU she spent about 4 days in the regular pediatrics unit. On about day 7 is when she started talking to us a little and was able to get out of bed and walk around a little. Then slowly she was able to have drinks and then food. The last couple days were really hard, because she was so ready to go home, but they had to see that she could keep food down and then be able to poop it out. On the day they were going to take her nose tube out, she actually pulled it out herself! I didn't even know she had done it! It actually was better that way I think!

So now we are home and all doing great! We want to thank everyone who helped, prayed for us, called, even thought of us! We really have realized that we have the best families and friends in the world! We've been able to realize how much we were blessed throughout this whole ordeal. It stinks that you have to go through things like this to make you realize how greatful you are for good health.

(This is right before we went home. She totally lost weight, as you can see.)